"No Longer Human" - Osamu Dazai (REVIEW)

On art's influence on reality.

I have seen one picture of the woman.

A black-and-white photograph, the kind one would carry in a heart-shaped locket during war. This effigy depicts a pale woman no older than 30, with a peaceful, despondent expression and a clear face; a kimono gently drapes around her figure, and it seems as though she isn’t just posing for a picture - there is something rather statuesque to her tranquility. 

Mesmerized by such a striking portrait one begins to wonder if this mysterious stranger has ever uttered the words “I feel so unhappy.” or if she took off her borrowed sash and folded it neatly on a rock before walking into the rain-swollen Tamagawa Canal hand-in-hand with her beloved on the 13th of June, 1948. 

The woman’s name was Tomie Yamazaki, and she’d remain in history as Osamu Dazai’s last lover. Their bodies wouldn’t be discovered until six days later, on what would have been the writer’s 39th birthday. 

A great deal of speculation surrounded their death. Perhaps, most notable is the statement of Keikichi Nakahata, a kimono merchant who was a frequent visitor of the young family, made upon seeing the scene of the water: “Dazai was asked to die, and he simply agreed, but just before his death, he suddenly felt an obsession with life”.

Is it plausible that this “obsession with life” caused the tell-tale signs of a man unwell to go unnoticed? After all, it seems peculiar of a dying man to keep on creating art. 

Perhaps not. History has proven repeatedly that authors tend to experience a startling increase of productivity shortly before their death. It is almost a curse of sorts, having plagued Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide shortly after her most popular work was completed, similar is the case of Earnest Hemingway, who felt unable to write after finishing his most impactful book - “The Old Man and the Sea” and many more.

Such cautionary tales exemplify that the contrary of the proverb “Art imitates life.” is true - life too can imitate art.

Suppose Yukio Mishima’s account that Osamu Dazai “played the roles that were not appropriate for him” is true. In that case, I am afraid that the latter played the “inappropriate roles” too well, so well in fact, that he predicted his demise in his 1948 novel. 

“No Longer Human” chronicles the life of “failed human” Oba Yozo and his desperate attempts to fit into a society where he feels he doesn’t belong by creating a farcical facade to conceal his true self. This “mask” costs him his happiness, fulfillment, and love and later lures him down the dark path of addiction, before his mysterious disappearance. 

A classic piece of Japanese postwar literature, Oba Yozo’s story is presented in the form of three notebooks left behind by the protagonist himself. The first-person narrative combined with the peculiar structure echoes another ageless novel - the 1916 “A Portrait of the Artist as a young man” by James Joyce. This modernist Kunstlerroman details the life of Stephen Dedalus as he begins to question his strictly catholic upbringing, before ultimately conveying his self-exile from Ireland and Europe. 

A semi-autobiography at its core, “No Longer Human” delves into enduring themes in the author’s life including recurring suicidal attempts, social alienation, and depression, compensated for with various perilous coping mechanisms. However, the blunt narration style of the book distances it from the autobiographical genre, despite the numerous coincidences with the actual course of the writer’s life. 

A commentary on the significance of the majority of society, though often not of high quality, in shaping reality and norms of what is acceptable and what is not, the novel describes the struggles with identity and mental illness of an individual, desperate to be seen as ordinary, instead of odd, which still retain their relevance many years later. 

In the words of Donald Keene - responsible for the English translation of Osamu Dazai’s work published by New Direction in Norfolk, Connecticut - “"No Longer Human” is not a cheerful book, yet its effect is far from that of a painful wound gratuitously inflicted on the reader.” From my perspective the story of Obo Yozo is not one void of happiness and love, omnipresent in his life, they seem to be right on the outside looking for a way to break in. Richard Gilbert’s anecdote in his review of Dazai’s “The Setting Sun”, gives a brilliant description of the Japanese author’s approach to writing: “To know the nature of despair and to triumph over it in the ways that are possible to oneself - imagination was Dazai’s only weapon - is surely a sort of grace.”